Thank you for that real-world perspective, vimalkumarp. It's one thing to hear from researchers how their invention could change things for people, it's another to hear it from someone who would actually use it. I personally hope this invention will make it into the hands of doctors sooner rather than later, especially given the description you've provided.

This reminds me of the way our tempature is being taken compared to a few years back. No more oral thermometers, they just swipe that thing across your forehead now. I love how we are engineers just keep making up ways to make things better and less annoying.

Beauty of this solution is that this is noninvasive . It is really painful to prick the finger many times a day for monitoring the glucose level and then do the corrective action. Though there are many initiatives to monitor glucose leve non invasively, like optical coherence methods, they are not accurate because of the design and implementation complexities. There is an innovation from Technion Israel ( electronic nose) to smell the chemicals and identify the constituents. These are great innovations towards non invasive glucose monitoring

Warren, I also have heard of dogs trained to detect keytons on peoples breath, as well as dogs trained to sense the smell of melanomas, (skin cancers), and the dogs wer better than 90% correct in the first study. And it is probably cheaper to maintain an accurate dog than to keep dome diagnostic machine calibrated.

This development may turn into a tool for diagnosing diabeties but it has a long way to go to be commercially viable.

Acetone and other ketones are not normally present in the breath. When fat is used for energy, ketones are produced. This could be from someone losing weight and using fat for energy or from someone not using glucose for energy such as a diabetic. The ketones in the blood show up in the breath and in the urine as a body rids itself of the ketones. Checking for ketones is easy with non-prescription test strips for testing urine. The urine test strips are read visually by comparing the strip to a color chart on the strip container. The cost is well under $1 per strip. I've seen this testing done for the camp and sports physicals for kids.

For testing in a medical facility, current technologies are going to be difficult to displace. Where blood is drawn as part of other diagnostic work, a blood glucose test is just another test on the sample. If blood is not being drawn, existing blood glucose meters can test a single drop of blood with a test strip that costs about $1 (or less).

Blood glucose testing with meters and strips is common for many diabetics. A few years ago bluesman B. B. King did several TV ads for a meter and strip manufacturer.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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